Siegmund Mayer

Who was Siegmund Mayer?

Siegmund Mayer was a German physiologist and histologist.

Mayer was born in Bechtheim in Rhenish Hesse. He studied at the Universities of Heidelberg, Giessen and Tübingen, where in 1865 he obtained his doctorate. He subsequently worked with Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz in Heidelberg, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig and Julius Friedrich Cohnheim in Leipzig, and with Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke in Vienna.

In 1869 he was habilitated for physiology at Vienna, and during the next year became Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering's assistant in Prague. In 1872 he became an associate professor and in 1887 a full professor. From 1880 he was director at the newly founded institute of histology.

Mayer made several important contributions particularly concerning the physiology of the heart and vessels, respiration and intestines. He was one of the first to describe chromaffin cells in the sympathetic nerve, and with Ewald Hering and Ludwig Traube, his name is associated with "Traube–Hering–Mayer waves", a phenomenon that deals with rhythmic variations in arterial blood pressure.

In addition to his scholarly papers published in scientific journals, he made contributions to Salomon Stricker's Handbuch der Lehre von den Geweben des Menschen und der Thiere and to Ludimar Hermann's Handbuch der Physiologie. He was also author of Histologisches Taschenbuch.